6. 1912–26: Late works.

In terms of its initial reception in larger Europe, the Fourth Symphony was a failure. Sibelius's estrangement from the new reception categories of Austro-Germanic and French modernism would drive the remainder of his career. Although his decision in early 1912 to turn down the offer of a position in composition at the Imperial Academy of Music in Vienna was prompted in part by local concerns, it was also a signal that he no longer sought the front lines of compositional battle on the terms offered by Central Europe. Fuelled by struggles with depression coupled with a visceral disdain for the polemically driven politics of musical fashion, his thoughts were turning instead towards withdrawal, private resistance to the new trends and continued explorations of the separatist path that he had set out for himself.

These attitudes were reinforced in early 1914, when Sibelius took a month-long trip to Berlin after a year of isolation in Finland. Once again he threw himself back into the Germanic swirl, and there he sought out alternatives to his own style: the music of Debussy, Mahler, Strauss and above all Schoenberg, including the first Kammersymphonie, the Second Quartet and a few songs. In his diary entries of 4 and 9 February he recorded his ambivalence to the new Expressionism: Schoenberg's music was ‘a legitimate and valid way of looking at things … but it is certainly painful to listen to … It gave me a lot to think about. He interests me very much’. Still, it was evident that his own music would maintain only a modest place on the continent and that the language, style and characteristic problems of the symphonic tradition were on the way to being judged obsolete.

In a curious twist of fate, the very qualities that were marginalizing him in Central Europe were proving attractive to certain traditionalist English and American circles, which were beginning to appropriate him as a Northern, ‘healthy’ antidote to a diseased musical modernism. Generally underexamined on all sides, Sibelius's music was on its way to becoming a much stormed, much defended redoubt in the modernist/anti-modernist culture wars. Anticipations of this had been sounded in England for several years. The next stage unfolded among Sibelius's American champions. In 1913 Horatio Parker invited him to undertake a concert tour the following year in the eastern USA. The principal sponsors, Carl Stoeckel and Ellen Battell-Stoeckel, commissioned a new work, to receive its première at the Music Festival in Norfolk, Connecticut, in June 1914 as the centrepiece of the visit: this turned out to be the tone poem, Aallottaret (‘The Oceanides’).

Sibelius's visit to America in late May and early June 1914 – on the eve of European war – was one of the grandest experiences of his life. He was welcomed as a celebrity, regaled with travel and luxurious accommodation, and praised rapturously; he visited New York, Boston and Niagara Falls (which moved him profoundly), met musical luminaries (Horatio Parker, Walter Damrosch, George Chadwick and others), carried off the première of The Oceanides and received an honorary doctorate at Yale University. Among the most important of Sibelius's new acquaintances was Olin Downes, then the critic for the Boston Post. Downes had already taken up Sibelius as a personal cause to counter the ‘overcultivated’ features of modern times – in retrospect, with a coarse vehemence, edgily reflecting his own psychological needs (‘music of intense masculinity, from which the erotic element … is entirely absent … a hero of the North … the last of the heroes in music … [who can] throw manners to the winds and bring back the gods’). He would pursue this overblown campaign in the 1920s and 30s as the leading critic for the New York Times. Although such Downesian projections (and their British analogues) would become leitmotifs among English-speaking traditionalists, their long-term effect would be negative, propping up Sibelius as a perennial ‘conservative’ target for partisan advocates of the dissonant ‘new music’.

Sibelius's actual compositional concerns during the years after the Fourth Symphony elude simplistic classification as either conservative or progressive: this late-period music resists such shopworn binary oppositions. At its centre was an increasing flight from cosmopolitan fashion into near-solitary contemplation – the turn onto ‘a lonely ski-trail that leads away to the depths of the forest’ (to cite the opening lines of a brief, metaphorically confessional work of 1925, Ett ensamt skidspår for narrator and piano, with text by Gripenberg). The deepest and most significant of his career, Sibelius's late works are inseparable from his day-to-day existence at his forest retreat, Ainola, outside Järvenpää: its towering, resinous pines, its crystalline lakes, its boreal plants and wildlife, including its majestic migrating birds (which so impressed the composer), its dramatic and pitiless change of seasons, its utter separation from anything urban. ‘Here at Ainola’, he would remark, ‘this stillness speaks’.

Since 1912 Sibelius had begun to envisage an enormous final project: bringing the 19th-century ideal of organic form to a culmination while exploring the relationship of the resulting form to an enhanced presence of musical sound. The composer had come to regard certain types of sound-image with reverence, as spiritually mappable onto the manifestations of Being concealed behind the visible surface of nature. At least within the sphere of musical practice, the composer appears to have held the quasi-animist conviction that long-dormant spiritual realities – roughly analogous to ancient, pagan gods – inhabit nature, waiting to be reawakened through meditative reflection. Supplementing what we may regard as Sibelius's aesthetic pantheism was his growing belief in the potential reuniting of music with nature. He now sought to bring the palpable, grainy textures of musical sound and the processes of musical elaboration into alignment with the magisterial spontaneity of nature's cries, rustles, splashes, storms, cyclical course and the like. Thus the act of composition became a neo-pantheist spiritual exercise. The resultant work of art was intended to invite a complementarily mystical, reverential or poetic listening – not to be captured by rational analysis or chalkboard explanation. Hence, one supposes, the mature Sibelius’s phobic rejections of virtually all published discussions of his music: he repeatedly lamented that academic or critical explications ‘misunderstood’ him.

Bearing such conceptual weight, the production of major works became a struggle (‘wrestling with God’, he wrote in his diary on 26 January 1916). The compositional battles of the final-period works, from Luonnotar (1913) and The Oceanides (1914) to the Fifth (three versions, 1915, 1916, 1919), Sixth (1923) and Seventh (1924) Symphonies and Tapiola (1926), were shot through with an unnerving mixture of creative exhilaration and crushing self-criticism. Most of the late works went through substantial reconceptualizations, recompositions and revisions before he consented to publish them. In April 1915 he compared his compositional practice to the search for the proper reconfiguration of scattered mosaic tiles flung down from heaven. Two years later, on 20 May 1918, he would write to Carpelan, ‘I notice how my inner being has changed since the period of the Fourth Symphony. And these symphonies of mine are more confessions of faith than are my other works’.

After the Fourth Symphony Sibelius sought to forge musical structures less dependent on traditional musical shapes than on the non-systematic, intuitive logic of the musical materials selected for any given composition. As he later explained, pieces were to grow by moment-to-moment motivic transformations as spontaneously and self-assuredly as frost patterns. In his diary entries of April, May and August 1912 he repeatedly vowed to develop this new method. For example, from 8 May, ‘I intend to let the musical thoughts and their development determine their own form in my soul’. As a result, his major works after 1912, veering from the usual symphonic shapes, have provoked different analytical interpretations. The tonal and rhetorical layout of sonata form (or even ‘free sonata form’), which had governed the outer movements of Symphonies nos.1–4, seems much less determinative of The Oceanides or the outer movements of the Fifth. With the Sixth Symphony – especially its finale – and the single-movement Seventh, sonata-form references are sidelined altogether, overridden by structures that are self-evidently coherent but not easy to classify with traditional terminology.

Over the years, Sibelius analysts – Abraham, Ringbom, Parmet, Tanzberger, Simpson, Tawaststjerna, Murtomäki and others – have proposed various solutions to this problem. Most of these solutions have been grounded in free adaptations of the standard structural categories: sonata, rondo, ABA, strophic construction, scherzo and trio, variations, ritornellos and the like; categories that are often relevant to these works but are rarely satisfactory as total explanations. The most deeply-rooted analytical tradition has marvelled at the concentrated germination and metamorphosis of motivic cells within a piece (analogous to Schoenbergian Grundgestalten, ‘basic shapes’), the almost imperceptible mechanisms of tempo change and texture change, and the uncanny interrelatedness of the themes. More recently, attempts have been made to submit these works to Schenkerian readings, sometimes merging those techniques with concerns for larger architectural shapes and the conclusions of past analyses. Perhaps most provocatively, Sibelius's son-in-law, the conductor Jussi Jalas, supported Simon Parmet's argument in the 1950s for a golden-section basis for the Seventh Symphony. Jalas even mentioned that Sibelius had told him that the sectio aurea informed all of his works, but that how it operated was ‘my secret’. Elaborated in published analyses, Jalas's claim is neither supported nor contradicted by external evidence that has yet come to light. No golden-section calculations appear, for example, in the materials of the Seventh Symphony. The claim remains a topic of controversy.

A broader consideration of these later works suggests that their predominant mode of organization is a more thoroughgoing version of the procedure anticipated in such works as Lemminkäinen's Return, the finale of the Third Symphony and the slow movement of the Fourth. Sibelius never gave the procedure a name but, again, it may be called rotational form: varied recyclings of the thematic pattern established in the piece's first rotation. Rotational form produces cumulative meditations – recurrent revisitings of past cycles, transforming and gathering new ideas as they proceed – which may or may not be set in tension with the expectations of sonata expositions, developments and/or recapitulations. Sibelius typically coupled rotational form with the principle of teleological genesis: the gradual awakening of a climactic goal-utterance (telos) – the more fully awakened ‘Being’ of nature – near the end of the piece. The free-rotational principle offered maximal formal freedom while encouraging new, coherently disciplined shapes. In most cases, the thematic ordering of the initial rotation remained relatively constant throughout the later cycles, though elements could be expanded or deleted or new ones added. In the final works, such as the highly complex Seventh Symphony, the rotational cycles recur with their constituent elements significantly shuffled or treated freely.

With this new compositional approach Sibelius sought to overcome the much-vaunted distinction between two seemingly opposed orchestral genres, symphony and tone poem, striving to fuse their most basic principles: the symphony's traditional claims of heft, musical abstraction, gravitas and formal dialogue with canonic works of the past; and the tone poem's axioms of structural innovation and spontaneity, identifiable poetic content and sonorous innovation. The stylistic distinction between symphony, ‘fantasy’ and tone poem in the late works is not easy to make, particularly since ideas that were first sketched for one piece sometimes wound up in another. (The Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies and Tapiola are interrelated works, four tableaux of a comprehensive vision of the spiritual presences animating the Northern forest-world. All four contain versions of materials first planned for the Fifth in the 1914–15 sketchbooks.). When the compositional result was a multi-movement work, as with the Fifth and the Sixth Symphony, Sibelius generally did not make public the underlying, nature-based poetic ideas, even though suggestions of them might be now recoverable from sketches or other evidence. Instead, he provided it with the abstract title, ‘symphony’, although in the early stages of each he had toyed with the title of ‘fantasy’ instead. When the result was a single-movement work with multi-movement implications, as with the Seventh Symphony, the genre became more ambiguous: the manuscript parts used at the Stockholm première of the Seventh (24 March 1924) read ‘Fantasia sinfonica no.1’; by February 1925, before its publication by Wilhelm Hansen in Copenhagen, Sibelius changed the title to ‘Symphonie Nr.7/In einem Satze’ (‘in one movement’).

The four extended, single-movement works without multi-movement implications received titles identifying them as myth- or nature-based tone poems. Two of these furnish an impressive gateway into the late period: Barden (‘The Bard’, 1913), brief and elusive; and the ‘tone poem for soprano solo and orchestra’, Luonnotar (literally, ‘[Feminine] Nature-Spirit’, 1913), a reshaping of the Kalevala creation story and the most uncompromisingly Finnish of Sibelius's major works. The remaining two are masterworks of the late style: the commission for America, The Oceanides (Aallottaret, literally ‘[Feminine] Spirits of the Waves’, 1913–14 – whose suppressed, never-performed first draft had been laid out in three contrasting movements, perhaps as something of a reply to Debussy's La mer); and, above all, the disturbingly primeval forest-evocation, Tapiola (literally, ‘Where the Forest God Dwells’, 1926).

Apart from these major works, Sibelius assembled smaller compositional scraps, usually with less elevated compositional claims, into other outlets. Some became appropriate incidental music – to Poul Knudsen's tragic pantomime, Scaramouche (1913, portions of which foreshadow The Oceanides), to the Finnish translation of Hofmannsthal's Jedermann (Jokamies, 1916) and, most impressively, to Shakespeare's The Tempest (Stormen, 1925), four or five movements of which are miniatures of the highest mastery, including the ferocious, whole-tone-grounded storm music, the gentle ‘Berceuse’, ‘The Oak Tree’ and ‘Prospero’. Others were fashioned into modestly saleable works for violin and orchestra (Laetare anima mea and Ab imo pectore, 1915, both performable alternatively with cello solo; or the Six Humoresques, 1917–18) or into individually titled, occasional pieces (the starkly minimalist, oddly stirring Andante festivo for String Quartet, 1922, rearranged for string orchestra and timpani, 1938). The late period also saw a scattering of lesser works (for piano, for solo instrument and accompaniment, for chorus) that he composed for financial or locally patriotic reasons.

Originally composed for the Helsinki celebrations surrounding his 50th birthday, the triumphalist Fifth Symphony in E – so different from the pessimistic Fourth – was performed in two preliminary versions (1915, 1916) before Sibelius decided on its final shape in 1919. The 1915 version, which has now been restored and recorded, contained four separate, motivically linked movements, each in rotational form: its brief, moderately paced first movement ended abruptly and was followed by a bustling scherzo that revitalized and recast the same themes; a slow movement and finale followed. In the 1916 version, no longer fully recoverable, Sibelius not only recast individual sections but also fused the first two movements by composing a climactic bridge between them. A breathtaking apotheosis of opening-page material, this bridge produced an orchestral breakthrough that sweeps commandingly through the tempo change required by the thematically related scherzo (parts of which, consequently, now also seemed somewhat recapitulatory). The 1919 revision – the familiar version – preserved the ‘fusion-form’, two-movement-in-one opening, with its slow-to-fast E trajectory (a locus classicus of Sibelius's art of tempo transformation) pivoting around the majestic, central bridge upheaval on B major, but altered, reordered and condensed numerous local details in all of the movements.

Although Sibelius provided no public information about the natural imagery grounding this ‘confession of faith’, two early diary entries (21 and 24 April 1915) as well as a private remark in one of Carpelan's letters to him (‘that swan hymn beyond compare’, 15 December 1916) make it clear that the composer identified the central finale theme (ex.6) with the splendour of the migrating swans sighted seasonally around Ainola – the circling of the grand birds far above, their wings lifting and pushing against the rushing wind. Nor, apparently, was the swan-related imagery (encompassing swans, cranes and wild geese – including their cries – as disclosers of ‘nature mysticism and life's Angst!’) confined to the finale. The germinal motive on the opening page of the first movement (an ascending 2nd followed by an upward-leaping 5th, scale-steps 1–2–6) had been a programmatic motif in his 1908 incidental music to Strindberg's fairy-tale play Swanwhite – the horn-call blessing of Princess Swanwhite's marriage-bed, surrounded by the ‘magic forest’ teeming with fantasy animals. Similarly, much of the Fifth's middle movement recalls delicate passages from the Swanwhite movement entitled ‘The Harp’, which represents the Swan-Mother's magical bestowal of graces on her daughter, the princess.

The late 1910s ushered in a different world for Sibelius – one more isolated from the rest of Europe and more heatedly politicized within Finland. The 1914 outbreak of World War I affected him swiftly and directly: his customary European travels became unthinkable; the gears of German and English publications (and royalty payments) ground to a near halt; and his income plummeted. Three years later, Finland's declaration of independence from the new, Lenin-led Russia on 6 December 1917 fulfilled a long-cherished national dream but simultaneously triggered a brief but bloody Finnish civil war between the socialist Reds and the ultimately victorious liberal-democratic Whites. Sibelius sided emphatically with the Whites, and on the eve of the civil war, in late 1917, he composed a crudely rousing Jääkärien marssi (‘Jäger March’) for accompanied male chorus in support of the anti-Red, Finnish Jäger battalion, which had been trained in Germany. Although musically insignificant, its political effect was explosive and unabashedly partisan. From this point onward the composer was identified with the pro-nationalist, anti-leftist cause. In early 1918 the civil war brought Red Guard control to his home, Ainola, and the composer was temporarily obliged to seek shelter in Helsinki. Nor did the German-assisted, pro-White resolution of the civil war put an end to Finnish political controversies. Factional turmoil was henceforth the order of the day, and Sibelius and his family – generally supportive of the right – would be pulled into ideological and Finnish-Swedish language disputes for years to come.

Other factors too seemed watersheds: his resumption, in 1915, of frequently reckless drinking after seven years of abstinence – bringing on, by the end of the decade, a pronounced tremor of the hands; Furuhjelm's ‘official’ (Swedish-language) biography from 1916, which celebrated Sibelius's status as a classic within Finland; and the emerging maturity and marriages of his oldest daughters (his first grandchild was born in 1915). Some time between February 1918 and May 1919, his decision to transform his appearance one last time – the adoption of the now-familiar, shaved bald head – projected an altered public and private persona: Sibelius as eccentric, uncompromising, alienated thinker, the man of granite, the 20th-century successor, perhaps, to the similarly cropped Bruckner. The next few years saw the deeply personal impact of the death in April 1919 of his friend and musical confidant, Axel Carpelan; his participation in (and occasionally intemperate behaviour at) the Nordic Music Festival in Copenhagen in June 1919; his visit to England in 1921, which turned out to be his last trip to that country; his decision in 1921 to decline an offer to become director of the new Eastman School of Music in the USA; and several European trips in the mid-1920s, including his last appearances as a conductor – in Stockholm, Rome and Göteborg in 1923, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Malmö in 1924, and finally Copenhagen again in 1926.

But it may have been his drinking, his personal and financial unreliability, and the resulting domestic tension that overrode everything else. Perhaps most telling was his scandalously drunken appearance as a conductor of his Sixth Symphony in Göteborg in April 1923. This incident prompted Aino in March 1924, faced with his continued alcoholism as he composed the Seventh Symphony, not merely to upbraid him but to write him a formal note of withering condemnation, vowing not to appear in public with him for its première – a note that remained secret until after his death over three decades later. As for Sibelius, deeply depressed and concerned about his ability to complete the symphony, he confided to his diary on 11 November 1923: ‘Alcohol, which I gave up, is now my most faithful companion. And the most understanding! Everything and everyone else have largely failed me’.

The four-movement Sixth Symphony was first performed on 19 February 1923 in Helsinki. In its isolated interiority and restraint – its ‘transcendental serenity’, in the words of Heikki Klemetti, an early Finnish reviewer – it was the antithesis of sensationalism: the composer described it as ‘pure spring water’, as opposed to the cocktails served up by younger composers. Many have noted the glowing purity of its quasi-contrapuntal long lines and ‘white-note’ style, especially in its eloquent opening, and have cited Sibelius's apparently concomitant study of Palestrina and Monteverdi as contributing factors. To a Swedish interviewer in February 1924, Sibelius described the Sixth as ‘built, like the Fifth, on linear rather than harmonic foundations. … [Its] four movements … are formally completely free and do not follow the ordinary sonata scheme’. As Tawaststjerna and Kilpeläinen have more recently noted, two of its themes appear in post-1915 sketches (perhaps c1919) with nature-grounded programmatic titles: Talvi (‘Winter’, foreshadowing the first movement's eventual bars 29ff, which Tawaststjerna argued was the movement's main theme); and Hongatar ja Tuuli (‘[Feminine] Pine-Spirit and the Wind’, an important interior theme of the finale – related to the rising-theme complex shown in ex.7 below). Extrapolating from this and remarks found in the diaries, both Finnish scholars have also linked the early stages of some of the Sixth's music with Sibelius's work in 1920 on a projected tone poem, Kuutar (‘[Feminine] Moon-Spirit’).

From a different cultural perspective the Sixth may also be understood as a quasi-pastoral meditation on Finnish uniqueness and difference – a maximally distilled summary of his late-style thought on the characteristic turns of minor- or Dorian-inflected Kalevalaic modality, which he had considered a central sign of Finnish ethnicity since the 1890s. Much of the Sixth is steeped in the linear motif of the D-Dorian pentachord, D–E–F–G–A (the ‘Finnish pentachord’), often outfitted with two upper extensions: the complementary tetrachord, A–B–C–D or the rounded contour, A–B–C–B–A, which replicates in a higher register the archetypically Sibelian ‘Finnish ideogram’ of a descending, linear minor 3rd. In the outer movements the D-Dorian saturation, in which sidelights and corners of the pure mode are singled out and caressed in detail, is often contrasted with the lower neighbour C major (or other C-modal) pitch collection, producing large-scale oscillations between D-Dorian and ‘C major’. In terms of thematic material – as is strongly suggested by sketch evidence – Sibelius constructed the symphony to grow towards the climactic Finnish-Dorian idea (related to the sketch-theme labelled ‘Hongatar ja Tuuli’ a few years earlier) presented in full only at a culminating point near the middle of its finale (ex.7, bars 72–83; basically rehearsal letters ‘D’ to ‘E’, subsequently recycled in an intensified restatement and led into a process of decay, decentring and valedictory farewell). Capping a four-movement process of motivic transformation, advanced rotational form and teleological genesis, this D-Dorian theme had been sketched about eight years earlier (in E Dorian, and without the later ‘Pine Spirit’ label) as a proposed melody for the Fifth Symphony. It became instead the basic idea and animating force of the Sixth.

Its companion piece from 1924, the Seventh Symphony – the product of much labour, recasting and revision – is surely Sibelius's most remarkable compositional achievement (fig.4). Although brief in duration (about 22 minutes), this ‘symphony in one movement’ articulates a vastness not measurable by clock-time: its churning, ever-transforming textures and tempos track a panoramic passage through four discrete sections, each of which aspires to the integrity of a symphonic movement even while participating in the uninterrupted growth process of the whole. The Seventh provides a late example of the historical drive towards a tonally grounded ‘multi-movement form in a single movement’, a post-Beethovenian compositional problem also confronted by Liszt, Strauss, Schoenberg and others. But with the Seventh the crucial factors are its unique musical language and its fantasy-like freedom from reliance on prior solutions to this problem: Sibelius provided it with the architectural satisfactions and expressive depth of an abstract symphony while breaking away from references to sonata form and other traditional formal models. As such, developing in free conceptual space unmoored by prior expectations, the Seventh stands as the consummate realization of his late-style rethinking of form. Its ad hoc structure emerges link-by-link from the transformational processes of the musical ideas themselves – a content-based form constantly in the process of becoming.

Because of its subtlety and the dizzyingly multiple motivic interconnections between widely separate passages, the Seventh has been resistant to traditional descriptions of its form. Differing interpretations abound. In large-scale terms, three principles seem clearly at work. First, Sibelius framed the symphony with the C major ‘bookends’ of Sections 1 and 4: the expository materials of the opening Adagio, cresting in the grand trombone theme (bar 60, seven bars after letter ‘C’), are given a freely reordered, shortened reprise (or valedictory farewell) beginning with the Presto nine bars after ‘W’. The two interior sections, grounded in the same motivic materials (as separate, freely shaped rotations), comprise a scherzo-like Vivacissimo (in place by letter ‘J’, if not earlier, after several bars of transition) and another, more expansive scherzo (perhaps the ‘Hellenic Rondo’ proposed years earlier for this symphony), beginning in C major, Allegro molto moderato, 13 bars after ‘N’. Secondly, the three full statements of the ‘trombone theme’ – perhaps consciously alluding to the horn call in Brahms's First Symphony – serve as arrival-points and conceptually organizing ‘cornerstones’ (Parmet) of the whole: they occur as the culmination of Section 1 (C major), as the chilly, windswept marker of a metrical gear-shift (C minor, around letter ‘L’) ultimately leading Section 2 into Section 3, and as a deeply affecting ‘farewell’ gesture near the opening of Section 4 (C major, three after letter ‘X’). Sibelius may have associated the trombone theme's grand vista with a contemplation of the breadth of the night sky. One of its early, rudimentary versions had been situated, along with material later placed in the Sixth Symphony, in thematic sketches for what may also have been reworked in the eventually discarded work Kuutar (‘[Feminine] Moon Spirit’: there the theme is labelled Tähtolä, ‘Where the Stars Dwell’). Thirdly, the rotational principle – the recasting of a collection of motifs in a series of multiple cycles – is dominant throughout, though treated with unprecedented freedom. Section 1, for instance, may comprise two rotations. The first, bars 1–22, lays out and provides an initial processual field for the basic motivic ideas: ascending scale, woodwind motif (bar 8), descending 4th, and so on, each of which seems to grow on its own terms; the second, bars 23–c89 (the polyphonic string passage producing the trombone theme) sets out again from the principle of linear ascent (compare bars 1–2) and reshapes the same ideas in substantially different ways.

The same kind of close-knit thinking is evident in Sibelius's last major composition (directly following his main work on the incidental music to The Tempest in 1925–6), the tone poem Tapiola, occasioned by a commission in 1926 from Walter Damrosch on behalf of the New York Philharmonic Society. Here, however, the specific gravity is even higher, quasi-minimalist in effect. The entire work, seeking an identity with the dark and ancient pine forests harbouring their hidden god, Tapio, is produced from the ramifying growth of a single, brief motif. This may be represented as 3–2–3–4–3–2–1 in minor (often in or around B minor, the piece's governing tonal colour), although the basic motif may be reduced even further to the ‘Finnish ideogram’, 3–2–1 – the heart of the work. In this respect Tapiola displays motivic intersections with the Sixth Symphony, and Sibelius may have generated its musical ideas at about the same time.

The content-based form, like its immediate predecessors grounded in transformable rotations, has provoked differing analyses: some have heard the work as a free-form, ‘evolutionary’ working of the fundamental motif; others as a ‘total variation form’; others, noting the break and double-bar before the D major ‘scherzo’ section (bar 208) and the suggestion of a varied reprise at bar 485, have proposed the presence of an imaginatively free dialogue with aspects of the sonata principle. (Sibelius, astonishingly, later remarked to his secretary Santeri Levas that Tapiola had been ‘written in a strict sonata form’.) Above all, what impresses is the work's unparalleled atmosphere, unique in the symphonic literature: its brooding stasis, gestational patience and long pedal points; its dark, hypnotic oscillations, registering an underlying, vital sway in the forest; its cold shadows and impersonal, elemental natural processes before which mere humankind fades into insignificance; its slow transformations of chordal colour (including modal, chromatic and whole-tone passages); the terrifying ferocity of its wind-lashed storms; the gathering up and climactic double-discharging of its basic motif (bars 356, 569, both triple-fortissimo), the self-disclosure of the animating forest-god.

Sibelius, Jean